Midnight in Chernobyl; The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Fourth printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Peter Eavis (Author photograph). xx, 38, [2] pages. Illustrated endpapers. Note on Translation and Transliteration. Illustrations. Maps. Author's Notes. Glossary. Units of Radiation. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Adam Higginbotham (born 1968 in Somerset) is a British journalist who is the former U.S. correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and former editor-in-chief of The Face. He has also served as a contributing writer for The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His narrative non-fiction and feature writing has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine. Many of his stories have been optioned for development in film and TV. Higginbotham is the author of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, published in 2019, which received the 2020 William E. Colby Award for Military and Intelligence Writing, the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction, and was selected one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by The New York Times. This work has been translated into 21 languages. A New York Times Best Book of the Year. A Time Best Book of the Year. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist. Journalist Adam Higginbotham's definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history's worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will, lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.